One of the things that never seems to stop surprising me is how the Blogging world is inter-connected. Granted a tool like Technorati does help a good deal, but these connections seem to come of their own accord. Thing is that I’ve noticed an increase of traffic lately and I was curious to see where it was coming from – I attribute some of this new traffic to some particular blogs out there. One of them is Ensight, which is a group forum by fellow Technologists. The other is one that I recently discovered: ***Dave Does the Blog. ***Dave has completely blown me away by using SharpMT to help in a full 24-hour Blog-a-thon. I’m thrilled because not only has the code kept up with his heavy blogging but… well… it’s just fuckin’ cool! Sorry. Had a Geek-moment!
SharpMT rocks. No, seriously, it is a fine offline MT editor, covers the important (to me) features of MT, and lets me save ongoing versions of a post (to disk) without getting the posting timestamp all out of whack. It made my life on the Blogathon much easier.
That said, features I’d love to see include:
1. Multiple edit windows (rather than having to save and exit out of one draft to open up another). I guess you can do that right now by invoking the program multiple times, but that’s a pain.
2. Resizeable (or at least larger/longer) edit fields for entry text and extended entry text. Being limited to five or six lines of text in each is a pain, especially in a long post.
3. Consistency with MT in how text selects, and in particular how text remains selected after clicking one of the format buttons. E.g., if I want to make something bold and italic in the MT edit screen, I highlight it, click on [B], click on [I], and it’s done. SharpMT loses its selection focus after the initial edit, moving the cursor to after the text I just bolded, so I have to select the text, click [B], reselect the text, click [I].
4. Autosave! (Can you tell I’m gun-shy about losing things?)
But those are all “reclassify SharpMT from great to insanely great” sorts of things. The product has held up great, and even though I *usually* still use the MT edit screens, having SharpMT for long posts or prolonged data entry is really handy. Thanks!
Oh, and alphabetized category lists, too! :-)
I stand corrected. My category list is now alphabetized. :-)
Harumph. And I see that the Extended Entry field grows significantly *if* I reside the window. Which is cool, though I’d rather both it and the Entry Body window were sizeable.